Anybody here look at Alexa Rank and or PageRank when doing research?

[PrizeWize]

Any Seo'ers out there still looking at PageRank and or Alexa Rank?

Any suggestions on how to look at these stats?

I personally believe both are not relevant in todays SEO researches.

I'm i very wrong?

[PrizeWize]

Very good point,

I hadn't thought about this yet. It could explain a lot. I've seen sites around with PR0 but a good link profile and was wondering why this is.

That might be the anwser.

Butt..... just spoke with a colleague about this and he mentioned his site got major penalties before (didnt even rank for its own brand name any more), whilst the pagerank went up from 2 to 3.

Man im confusing myself now again. Darned PageRank, so many sites with good PA and DA but Pr 0. So i or should i not get that link hahaha.

[DorotheaKettler]

As Mat Bennett already mentioned, the information provided by Alexa is way to impartial in order to provide any relevant information.

As for PageRank, in correlation with other metrics it's useful to find out if a website was penalized due to suspicious link schemes or link selling. For example, if a 2-3 year old website is linked through tons of good quality links, yet it has no PageRank, then there's most likely something rotten with it.

[josh-riley]

I agree. Rand did a great column on this subject earlier this year. My takeaway? If it's not accurate, then why bother http://www.seomoz.org/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-google-trends-quantcast

[Jinx14678]

Ehhh depends on what you are looking at them for

As competition analysis of others in your niche it can give you some insight into them and the landscape of your path ahead (as well as used in conjunction with other general cyber forensics tactics)

If using for link evaluation, if it is a PR 0 then it MIGHT be a bad sign (but also might mean nothing), but I truthfully am not sure how correct of a statement that is these days.

If using Alexa as a basis for an analysis of a possible exposure/traffic link, then it is in conjunction with other traffic tools a way to estimate the traffic/exposure your link might see.

But as an overall part of a big picture strategy I think they are useless, but still have their small role to play in conjunction with hundreds of other data points and tools.

Shane

[matbennett]

I'm not sure that Alexa really ever had any relevance. It was always based on too small a sample and was too easily gamed for me.

Toolbar PR I suppose can still fill in a small part of an overall decision. However I can't think of many questions that you could answer looking at those two metrics alone.